Given the public/private crossovers all our lives have become online, it’s hard for people to find the boundaries these days between personality and brand; between what’s appropriate and fun and what’s being a needy whiner.

It’s a slippery slope: one day you swap -ise for -ize and call something ‘awesome’; the next you’re draped in stars and stripes and riding a mechanical bull into the golden arches of hell, where you swear before Donald Trump with one hand on Webster’s dictionary.

I have such a case of ‘Imposter Syndrome’. I find it really hard to believe that my work is any good at all. I thought that it would go away once I was published, but I can always seem to explain that away (got lucky; they didn’t have anyone better; they took pity on me as a friend/emerging writer, etc). I find myself not applying for prizes or submitting to publications because I’m so intimidated by the competition.

One of the legacies of Tony Abbott’s prime ministership will surely be his tendency to misspeak. His worst lapses need no repetition, no explaining. Most of us have his best-of unfortunately committed to memory, and the quotes tend to be self-evidently racist /sexist /homophobic /Islamophobic /xenophobic /blisteringly ignorant of everything from climate change science to the importance of land and country to First Australians. Really, he covered a lot of ground.

I recently found out that I won a minor literary prize. It’s not much money, but it’ll help, and psychologically it’s enough of a boost to keep me going for some time. A lot of writers are giving their prize money away to people or groups who need it more, and I know there are a lot of worthy causes out there especially with this government’s brutal cuts to the arts, attacks on refugees, etc. So is it rude not to donate some of the money to other artists or to a charity?

Halfway through my presentation a fellow student interjected and began regurgitating exactly what I’d been saying. He spoke directly to me, as if he were the tutor and I were his lowly student who hadn’t quite managed the readings that week. It was infuriating, and oddly humiliating – I started to wonder if I had misunderstood the theory, since he was delineating it with such gusto.

To this day, there is a particular sort of person we describe as ‘FOTZ’. It’s hard to define exactly, but I know ’em when I see ’em. FOTZ is the intersection between dagginess, hippydom, and social ineptitude. Their beetroots are organic and their children are gifted. They wear their sense of superiority like a defensive cloak. When I started thinking about this article, I asked my mother what characterises a FOTZ. ‘It’s standing on top of the tour guide so as not to miss a thing,’ she said, ‘but not wearing your listening ears because you don’t have that capacity.’

It seems to me the politics of dress has a lot in common with the politics of art, forever grappling with the tension between aesthetics and functionality, innovation and social expectation, presentation and representation. Celebrities, for example, are walking product endorsements: designers pay a lot of money to film stars or pop singers to simply go for a walk around New York City wearing their new season’s dress or handbag or overcoat. Exposure and brand alignment creates recognition, influence, and sales.

But if you’re looking for permission to write something, nobody is going to give it to you, ever. Certainly not the deceased. So take the silence of these dead white men you venerate as consent to dig them up and go through their pockets.

Words are added to dictionaries when their usage gains currency. Merriam-Webster advises that a new word must have ‘enough citations to show that it is widely used’. The Macquarie says ‘to earn a place in a dictionary, a word has to prove that the community at large accepts it’. This isn’t something the linguistic powers-that-be take lightly. ‘Twerk’ didn’t make it in because an Oxford editor went to a Big Freedia show and decided to (literally) spread the good word.

2015 has been something of an annus horibilis for self-styled 'wellness warriors'. First, alternative therapy advocate Jessica Ainscough passed away from the cancer she had been treating with Gerson Therapy. Next, celebrity chef Pete Evans had his infants cookbook Bubba Yum Yum: The Paleo Way pulped on the eve of its release date after one of its recipes was found to have potentially baby-killing levels of vitamin A.

As you may know by now, the luxury of the first draft is best indulged completely. Silencing the superego/inner critic allows the story to flow out of you like unruly fans flowing out of a stadium, brimming with the intoxication of victory and mid-strength beer.

I want to treat language with respect. But I also want to respect the people who use it. And this is why no linguistic error will ever make me roll my eyes more than miserly nitpickers - often anonymous - who take it upon themselves to correct others' spelling, grammar and punctuation online.

Recently Australia has rediscovered an old crime, one it intends to charge Indigenous people with: identity fraud. Apparently the 'white blacks' of Andrew Bolt's imagination are back. Somewhere in Australia there is a mob of pretenders who are lining up to claim the privileges of Indigeneity.

Not long after Melbourne teenager Masa Vukotic was stabbed to death, my Facebook feed was roiling with emotion. Vukotic was not the first woman to be murdered in Australia this year, and, shamefully, will not be the last, but something about the attack – perhaps the fact that Vukotic was killed in broad daylight while exercising in a public space – triggered the kind of fierce public reaction not seen since the murder of Jill Meagher in 2012.